Elemental Shaman on 100 - So long and thanks for all the fish.

[Schadow]

And if you would have spent like 2 minutes on a dummy, you would have realized that multistrike events do proc mastery events, but mastery itself doesnt multistrike.

So a triple lavaburst multistrike will proc 3 mastery shards.

my realm was down due to maintenance, so I could not check. Fastest way was to ask in this case. Thanks for answering.

[Razhiel]

Our problems PvP wise aren't just numbers, they're mechanical. Numbers are just the salt being rubbed into the wound.

This right here is exactly the problem.

It's not just about the numbers (dps) it's about how the class performs in both PvE and PvP with it's mechanics. And let's be honest, it's a sinking boat filled with holes, barely afloat; you can patch it up all you want, but it's still gonna sink eventually.

There were many people, with a lot more knowledge about the class, making posts left and right with (some) very good ideas on how to, potentially, fix the class and what problems it might have in this expansion; but for some reason the devs kinda ignored it all, because "it kinda works for now, so no big deal".

We need a new boat dammit!

[Deleted]

Damage is still pitiful.

[maizensh]

Shamans tool for this are spritwalkers grace, instants (shocks, lvb procs) maintenance (redroping /droping totems), and as u seem to have not realized, unleash runspeed buff, and lastly, ghostwolf. This is more than for example frostmage has.

I don't play ele, though I do play frost mage and this is just absurdly funny.

This is more skills, but they sum up to less final effect. Current mobility of frostmage amongst casters is godlike and whoever is the second runner up comes miles behind. First, frost has two castable spells which is the filler and frost bomb, all the rest are instants. Bomb can be swapped out which leaves frost mage with just one castable spell. Mage has 2 blinks. Mage has ginvis to just stand in almost whatever for 3 seconds. Plus 3 charges of ice floes. This should cover all basic movement needs which require more than spending a proc. And even if you're out of procs and everything else is on cd (yeah, right...) you can keep spamming that IL for more dps than shaman's shock.

Finally if the fight just requires constant movement (no such thing, but still), frost mage has this nifty option to spec into thermal void and do that IV extension via ice lance spam, basically removing 80% of penalty from movement, and rivaled only by hunters (from ranged perspective) while moving most of the fight. Bottom line, frost has way less things to do when moving, but all those things do way more damage and you can do them non stop.

[Deleted]

There is no point in arguing with you. Minus the cast times all of those things you said could be applied to MoP.

"It has been like X in MoP" is not a very good argument Bape, that's my entire point. The game is now a different one than it was in MoP a far more Melee heavy one mind you. We had lightning bolt on the move in MoP also, we had a mastery that allowed for a far superior multistrike than we do now, we had far shorter cast times and even back then we already struggled against classes as rogues.

The thing is, that these problems have been amplified by the changes to other classes since then. Is it so hard to concede the point that we're not playing classic, bc or MoP anymore but WoD which has a different PvP Meta?

We need a new boat dammit!

Our mechanics are dated, extremly so and at this point I absolutely do not understand why they rework at least some of them. Take a look at healing rain and compare it to the new mushroom. The mushroom is in every single last way superior. It lasts thrice as long, it has neither cast time nor a CD and it actually heals for just as much unless you get a lot of mastery benefit for healing rain. It's the same frigging spell except properly tuned for the current expansion and content. The ability to just cast it on someone is also very, very, very nice so you don't lose time targeting it on the ground.

Yes it's a resto example but it's like that for a lot of our abilities. Bape thinks he counters my arguments "it's been like that since classic" when that's exactly the problem. It's not an argument against changing things or that we're bad now, it's an argument proving it.

[TheTieThatBinds]

Someone has to get the short stick...

+10 for having Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in the title.

Problem is, Shaman have ALWAYS gotten the short stick, consistently every expansion. We have never been "Flavor of the Month" , ever. We did pretty good DPS in Wrath and BC, but since then, we have almost always been below all other casters.

I still remember when we had(still have?) the lowest damaging main spell in the game in Lightning Bolt. Druids had a similar one, but wrath wasn't their main spell, moonfire was.

This was talked about in BC..., BC!!!! They still have yet to fix us.

With the way a lot of things are going, I could totally see them making 4 trees/specs for all classes. If they did this, they should make a tanking tree for shaman, like they intended us to do in Vanilla. Maybe we could at least do 1 thing really well...

That aside, a few things IMO that would actually help us by changing:

1) LB brought down to a 1.5 cast speed
2) Make EQ instant, but share CDs with Shocks
3) Revert our Mastery back to the way it was, so we would double benefit from Mastery and Multistrike(they are trying to do this with our LvB right now with the current changes they are doing)
---3a) another option, change our Mastery to throw a LvB out from our Searing Totem everytime it procs the mastery, this way it only attacks NPCs/Players we just cast a spell at, and wont hit CC'd targets. Maybe even make the LvB cast this way splash on 2 adjacent targets lighting them up with Flame Shock/or refreshing it if it was already on it.
4) Make capacitor totem knock the casting shaman back the same distance as TS knocks enemys back, while stunning any NPC/player around for the advertised duration.
5) Make GW cleanse all CC or slows when transforming in and out of it (PvP-specific change)
6) Make LB castable while moving again
7) *Suggestion* make Flameshock stack, up to 5 times, maybe more depending, increasing the damage FS does per tick by 20% everytime.

[Auberdeen]

Here's someone who doesn't play elemental nor have they stepped foot into heroic dungeons. Elemental is towards the bottom in terms of DPS performance, if they were beating hunters/dks well then the people playing the other classes blow. In terms of PvP I don't think I've ever seen ele be so useless in the 8 years I've played.

I've played a shaman since I first started 8 years ago, was resto through BC then I've been ele ever since and I always stuck it out but this time I'm thinking of moving to a warrior.

dont go arms LOL

[Deleted]

Isn't the lack of DPS on the move as Elemental, given how WoD has a lot of movement-heavy encounters in Dungeons/Raids, still an issue?

To my knowledge, Elementals are one of the best casters on the move. All casters are screwed now, when it comes to movement.

[Deleted]

So Pre-buff my LvB hit for 16k, Post-Buff it hits for 16.5k, did they change the base dmg? (Both were unbuffed on the garrison dummy). Do these changes come to players randomly?

[TheTieThatBinds]

So Pre-buff my LvB hit for 16k, Post-Buff it hits for 16.5k, did they change the base dmg? (Both were unbuffed on the garrison dummy). Do these changes come to players randomly?

regardless, 500 dmg from a "supposed" 35% increase in damage on LvB is retarded. at least we can look at this as a step in the right direction...

[Tyze]

To my knowledge, Elementals are one of the best casters on the move. All casters are screwed now, when it comes to movement.

Frost Mages disagree :P

[Bapestar]

When I said some of the shaman issues have been in the game since vanilla, I know it is not a very good argument but still. People want ALL these issues resolved right now. All us shaman players want this obviously, but I don't think Blizzard can fix all the issues in one sweep.

[Pua]

When I said some of the shaman issues have been in the game since vanilla, I know it is not a very good argument but still. People want ALL these issues resolved right now. All us shaman players want this obviously, but I don't think Blizzard can fix all the issues in one sweep.

I think it feels worse this time around because they took 14 months to release something new, for a spec that was very good, and several classes have done very well out of it.

Shamans have flat-out done appallingly, and there's no legitimate excuse for them going live in a state that's worse in every meaningful way.

It's a real let down.

[Thallidomaniac]

When I said some of the shaman issues have been in the game since vanilla, I know it is not a very good argument but still. People want ALL these issues resolved right now. All us shaman players want this obviously, but I don't think Blizzard can fix all the issues in one sweep.

I think it feels worse this time around because they took 14 months to release something new, for a spec that was very good, and several classes have done very well out of it.

Shamans have flat-out done appallingly, and there's no legitimate excuse for them going live in a state that's worse in every meaningful way.

It's a real let down.

There was also the part that Shaman players of all ages and walks of life in WoW posted feedback during WoD beta about how bad they are at 100, and Blizzard decided to go "Screw you all", and release Shaman in this state in WoD.

[Deleted]

To my knowledge, Elementals are one of the best casters on the move. All casters are screwed now, when it comes to movement.

Then you're not very knowledgable about casters. We're bad with movement since they took away lightning bolt on the run.

There was also the part that Shaman players of all ages and walks of life in WoW posted feedback during WoD beta about how bad they are at 100, and Blizzard decided to go "Screw you all", and release Shaman in this state in WoD.

Actually, that wasn't all they did. Celestalon told all of these people they just couldn't play and had no idea and then nerfed Shamans some more.

[Frostbites]

From a PvE point of view, I feel, damage wise, we are ok. I absolutely cannot say we are top, but we are definitely not on the bottom.
However, in the mobility department, complete trash. As long as we do not have spiritwalker's grace up, we have no movement spells. We could luck out and get an instant Lava Burst here and there, but it is too inconsistent to rely on when moving.
In my honest opinion, above all else, I feel Blizzard should revert the change to lightning bolt and allow it to be cast on move again. Everything else I can deal with, but this, this needs to change.

[Pua]

There was also the part that Shaman players of all ages and walks of life in WoW posted feedback during WoD beta about how bad they are at 100, and Blizzard decided to go "Screw you all", and release Shaman in this state in WoD.

I’ve said it multiple times since the launch of Cataclysm, and it still resonates to this day; the class designers don’t actually play the game in any meaningful way. They can’t or, if they do, they only play a few classes relatively passively, and some not at all. The best players are, without a doubt, significantly more capable than the “players” that design the class.

The bigger problem for me (and you see it in this thread) is that both the designers, and the community, confuse good design with comparative power. The two aren’t synonymous, but too many people seem to think that they are. Earlier, I said that shamans didn’t need buffs – they need a whole rework. Yes, buffs are still required because Elemental is woefully undertuned, but it’s the underlying design that’s problematic.

- Slow rotation.
- Bad tuning.
- Weak utility.
- No mobility.
- Totems.
- Cumbersome AoE.

That’s not even considering the more niche problems that still plague Elemental such as shocks sharing a cooldown for no reason, the value of Elemental Blast during Ascendance, or a level 100 talent tier that really just puts another blockage into the breach.

My point is that you can make the spec strong, without ever fixing any of this. The class might then go up the meters, but it’d still be broken from a design point of view. I remember the warrior discussions about Colossus Smash, and that’s how it all shook out – it was fine from a PvE power point of view, but it simply wasn’t good design for a multitude of reasons. Shamans, at this point, now have several iterations of the Colossus Smash problem.

The buff and nerf cycle won’t help them. Going down that route will make shamans too good, or (at the moment) no good. This is why, I suspect, the likes of Veleth and others are saying it’s probably best to just ditch your shamans for this expansion. Endemic design problems weren’t fixed during an interminably long development period, and despite some exceptional feedback on the forums. There’s no reason to believe that these issues will be fixed with the expansion now live, and history tells us that pretty much only mages get expansion-level design time during the normal patch cycle.

I’m moving on.

[Deleted]

Has anyone seen the new sims after the buffs? I can't really decide what to think of them. Ele at 630 is supposed to do almost 29k? Even with the buff that is borderline impossible, except for a 30sec fight with all CDs and primal elemental...

[Deleted]

Has anyone seen the new sims after the buffs? I can't really decide what to think of them. Ele at 630 is supposed to do almost 29k? Even with the buff that is borderline impossible, except for a 30sec fight with all CDs and primal elemental...

Take a look at the damage breakdown of said fights. People before already listed a lot of sims trying to prove that Elemental was fine and then it turned out that about 50% of the damage came from earth quake. Just deduce earth quake in said sims and you'd get a more reliable average, might also want to throw out chain lightning since it's only good for several mobs at once.

[Shirohibiki]

I've been reading this thread for a little while... And out of curiosity, is it even worth it to level my Shaman alt at this point? I've always liked Shaman, but especially when they took away moving LB, it hurt. So I guess there's my question; should I level other alts instead? :/